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Our Christmas Decorations 2015

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Hello Lovelies,

Recently we put up our Christmas decorations and I thought I'd share with you our Christmas Tree and some of our other decorations too, I love seeing how other people decorate their homes for Christmas and hopefully you'll enjoy seeing how we have decorated ours.

The Christmas Tree

We have an artificial Christmas tree and have had this tree for around 13 years now and it still looks lovely, Simon and I actually bought it half price from our local garden centre it was £80 instead of £160, we would never had paid £160 for a Christmas tree but the one we had at the time was on it's last legs and we desperately needed a new one, we saw this one in the garden centre and loved it it's very full and we get a lot of compliments on it and we have certainly had our monies worth.

Our eldest daughter Cole decorated our tree with a little help from Lissy too, the girls love decorating the tree and have always helped but as they have gotten older they do it, Cole is very creative so it always looks lovely, well we think so. We have a tradition in our house where the girls each choose a new decoration for the tree each year and have done since they were born (obviously we chose when they were too small to do it) Cole loves Polar Bears and Lissy loves Dachshunds and monkeys so we have quite a lot of those plus other cute things including bears which are sentimental to our little family, you'll also see some Star Wars decorations on there too and I don't need to tell you who chose those!

Also on our tree this year we have 2 beautiful hand made baubles in memory of our lovely dog Oscar who we lost July 2014 and our beautiful bunny Tallulah who we lost in November this year, the baubles were made by my lovely friend Ashleigh who is incredibly talented, she is a fantastic illustrator and has made some fabulous You Tube and Blog banners and she is also extremely talented in paper cutting, I'm afraid I don't know the artistic term for it (sorry Ashleigh) but the baubles are stunning and we love them.

My photographs don't really do them justice but they are beautiful. Myself, Simon and the girls chose Silver sparkly writing for Oscar and a silver ribbon with little white snowballs and for Tallulah we chose bright pink sparkly writing and ribbon and the same little white snowballs but there are so many different colours to choose from for the writing and ribbon and there are lots of different things you can choose from to have in the bottom of the baubles too. I think the baubles would make an excellent Christmas gift for someone as you don't have to have a memory bauble, Ashleigh can customise them for any occasion or person, I think I am going to order Grandma and Grandad baubles for my parents from the girls next year, but you can choose whatever you'd like they are beautiful and we can't thank Ashleigh enough. If you would like to order your own bauble or take a look at Ashleigh's work which I highly recommend you do since she is super talented, she has her own Etsy shop which you can find HERE.

Some Of Our Other Decorations

We also decorate our sideboard and windowsill and TV cabinet so we have various different decorations on those too.

This is our sideboard, we have had the decorations on here for a long time and next year we hope to change this and have new decorations, we weren't in a position financially to do it this year and we've had a rough few months so we thought next year would be a better time to change this up. Please ignore the phone and wifi hub they don't look very festive do they?

This is a tea light holder and looks lovely with a lit candle in it, it is sparkly but the photograph isn't really picking it up well, I love all the little toys on it and it does look really pretty at night time with a tea light in it.

We have 3 of these tea light holders on the sideboard too which are years old and originally came from Asda, they weren't expensive at all, if I remember rightly I think the tea light holders were £1 each and the mirrored plates were 50p and all were on a 3 for 2 offer but with the silver glittery tea lights in them they look lovely and sparkly for Christmas.

We have lots of cute decorations because as I said we've had them years and most of them the children have picked out, this is a wobbly Father Christmas with a snowman on his back and the chap in the background is a ski loving snowman, we also have a Rudolph on the other side as you'll see in the photograph above and a wobbly snowman too.

This lovely little dolly was made by my lovely mum, she bought the wooden dolly at a craft fair a few years ago and covered her "shoes" in gold glitter then used paper quilling to decorate her making her a dress and hat and necklace, her hair is also paper quilling. Everyone who comes to our house at Christmastime comments on how lovely she is, my mum is super talented and I'm very proud of her, she makes the most beautiful cards too so keep an eye out on my Instagram account to see this years Christmas cards, there are some cards on there which she has made for birthdays etc including an incredible Darth Vader card for Simon.

This is our Rudolph in bed stocking, we did have 2 of these which we hung from our sideboard but we had some uninvited guests last Christmas in our loft which we named Mickey and Minnie who decided to chew one of our lovely stockings up along with some of our decorations, pesky mice! The Rudolph stocking is now hanging from our lounge door.

Our windowsill is decorated with Polar Bears and Penguins but we also have 2 of these Yankee Candle gingerbread men candle holders resting on star shaped candle plates, they look lovely with a lit tea light in them, we also have our window decorated with Gel Gems and it looks incredible, Cole decorates the window every year and she is so creative it always looks lovely but unfortunately trying to photograph the gel decorations proved very difficult and they didn't come out well at all, maybe next year I'll take a photo in the packaging then you can see the decorations, the window looks lovely though and so many people comment as they go by our house as you can see the Gel Gems from both inside and out. Some of our gel gems are old but we had 2 new packs for this year which you can buy HERE and HERE they are £4.95 per pack but there are some cheaper ones available, we like to use this website to buy ours from.

These little clay decorations sit next to our television, my mum bought me them from a craft fair years ago but they are so sweet and look lovely.

Last but not least is out musical Father Christmas, we bought him along with the Rudolph stocking the first Christmas me and Simon lived together so a very long time ago now, they were from WHSmith if I remember rightly, he has sparkly thread in his beard but it isn't showing up on the photograph, he moves and plays a tune of "Santa Claus is coming to town" when you wind him up at the back.

So those are all our Christmas decorations that we have in our lounge, we do have our advent calendars in the kitchen and Simon has a Star Wars lego one in the lounge plus we have a Christmas tree shaped card holder but I didn't think you'd want to see those, we have some gel decorations in the glass in our front door and back door too which can be seen from outside and the girls have little trees and decorations for their rooms, so we're pretty festive throughout the house.

We also have an Elf On The Shelf named Oscar, I post pictures of him on my Instagram account if so if you'd like to keep up with his antics be sure to follow me over on Instagram.

I hope you enjoyed seeing our Christmas decorations, next year hopefully we will have some new things to show you, we have actually got something new but we have saved it for next year because we are going to have the windowsill and sideboard different so we wanted to save it so next Christmas I should have a decorations haul post plus things should look different should you want to see another post like this.